Saturday, November 24, 2007

Farm Geometry

The farmers of Sconth are near the end of the annual harvest; there's hardly anything left in the fields now except the icicle tapers, which won't be ready to harvest until they've frozen solid. Everything else has been packed away into storerooms. Many of the insectoid farmers, having emptied their fields and closed down their farms for the Winter, will spend the next five months in hibernation. That's really the only choice for cold-blooded people in the mountains.

Today, the streets of Sconth were rumbling all day long with carts full of the city's famous cube turnips. Nearly everyone in Sconth eats cube turnips. They're nutritious, easy to grow, and fairly tasty, if you can chew them. Those who can't either mash them or grind them into flour.

In addition to this, cube turnips are probably the easiest vegetables in the world to store. Once the leaves are cut off, they can just be stacked up like blocks. Many farmers build houses out of them and gradually eat them over the Winter. They come out of their houses every day, climb up on the roof, and take a piece off the chimney for dinner. The fields no longer growing turnips sprout turnip huts instead. One particularly ambitious turnip architect to the West of town is working on a full-scale castle, complete with crenelated turnip turrets.

Cube turnips are best known, though, for what the bakers do with them. Not everyone has heard of turnip architects; not everyone has even heard of Sconth, city of mathematicians. But everyone has heard of its famous Square Root Pie.